Deborah Jeane Palfrey (March 18, 1956 – May 1, 2008),[1] dubbed the D. C. Madam by the news media, operated Pamela Martin and Associates, an escort agency in Washington, D.C.

Although she maintained that the company's services were legal, she was convicted on April 15, 2008, of racketeering, using the mail for illegal purposes,[1][2] and money laundering.

She graduated from Rollins College with a degree in criminal justice, and completed a nine-month legal course at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law.

[9] In October 2006, agents with the United States Postal Inspection Service posed as a couple who were interested in buying Palfrey's home as a means of accessing her property without a warrant.

[10][9] Agents subsequently froze bank accounts worth over US$500,000, and seized papers relating to money laundering and prostitution charges.

[13] Ultimately, ABC News, after going through what was described as 46 pounds (21 kg) of phone records, decided that none of the potential clients[14] were sufficiently "newsworthy" to bother mentioning.

[27] On May 1, 2008, roughly two weeks following her April 15 conviction, Palfrey was found hanging in a storage shed outside her mother's mobile home in Tarpon Springs, Florida.

According to her former attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, she even took the extraordinary step of writing directly to the prosecutor, promising to show more resolve than Britton.

[1][34] On July 9, 2007, Palfrey released the supposed entirety of her phone records for public viewing and downloading on the Internet in TIFF format though days prior to this her civil attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, had dispatched 54 CD-ROM copies to researchers, activists, and journalists.

[citation needed] Montgomery Blair Sibley, Palfrey's former attorney, claimed her phone records were relevant to the 2016 presidential election.